


The Hollow Men

by flecksofpoppy



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Gen, Inspired by Poetry, Philosophy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-07
Updated: 2016-06-07
Packaged: 2018-07-12 20:31:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7121512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flecksofpoppy/pseuds/flecksofpoppy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Armin and Erwin talk in a vast room.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Hollow Men

**Author's Note:**

> Spoiler for SNK 82.

_We are the hollow men  
We are the stuffed men  
Leaning together  
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!  
Our dried voices, when  
We whisper together  
Are quiet and meaningless  
As wind in dry grass  
Or rats' feet over broken glass  
In our dry cellar_

—The Hollow Men by T.S. Eliot

He doesn’t expect the desk to be oak; no one ever has ever called him to grand a room as this.

Armin straightens his uniform, noting the sun’s strange pale light through the distorted glass window, too high in the sky to be a real time.

“Oh,” he says when he sees Erwin, arm of jacket folded and pinned, “I see.”

He knows suddenly: that time, without blood, and only pale light.

Erwin leans back in his chair, his lack of arm doing nothing to hamper his balance, and he smiles. It’s strangely sad, candid in a way that Armin only ever assumed he’d be with Levi.

“So,” he starts, raising an eyebrow, “here we are.” Despite his lackadaisical pose, his eyes are serious, and thenArmin suddenly realizes what this is. 

“I’m…” he trails off, clenching his fists as he stares down at the grey slate floor. “I’m going to die, aren’t I?”

Erwin smiles, shaking his head in bemusement; somehow, though, he looks happy. “I never thought the afterlife would have such tidy walls.”

The walls are white-washed, a strange juxtaposition for the elaborate desk and sumptuous slate floor. 

“Well,” Erwin continues, “now that we’re here, what exactly are we doing together?”

Armin thinks for a moment, shaking his head; he’s still not sure whether he should be overwhelmed with sorrow that he’ll never see any of them again—Eren, Mikasa, Jean—or intrigued.

“Is this a test?” he finally manages, resenting the fact his voice comes out a squeak.

Erwin chuckles darkly, shrugging his broad shoulders, reclining in his throne-like chair. “I’m afraid that I’m the poorest king that ever lived,” he replies, “no arm, no fortune, no clue. Not here at least.”

Armin sighs deeply, looking down as he studies his scuffed boots. There’s a short silence in the otherworldly hall, but then Erwin speaks again.

“Tell me,” he says, “what do you dream of?”

“Death,” Armin replies without hesitation, “and sometimes, the ocean.”

“Do you fear either one?” Erwin asks, seeming genuinely interested.

“Yes,” Armin admits, still not looking up. “I fear them, but the second one more.”

“The sea is very vast,” Erwin observes, his voice amused, “or so I hear. My father told me as much.”

“Do you miss your father?” Armin asks, looking up to meet eyes as blue as his own.

There’s a weighted pause, but then, Erwin nods. “It’s why I look beyond the Walls.”

Armin’s laugh is quiet, slightly bitter, like the smell of the Shiganshina canal on a summer’s day; he remembers those things even now.

“That’s absurd.”

“We’re aging, Armin,” Erwin says suddenly, not addressing the slight to his family. “This room is stranger than the territory outside the Walls.”

They’re both thinking it, and as an act of respect, and possibly desperation, Armin straightens his uniform and salutes.

“We’re dead,” he guesses, “aren’t we?”

Erwin hums, his voice meditative as he continues to sit behind the desk and ponder.

There’s a long pause, and Armin suddenly realizes how the light hasn’t changed, how his boots are still scuffed, how the fine oak of the desk is perfect and the slate floor have no marks.

He rephrases. “I’m going to die,” he starts over, acceptance settling into his dream bones quickly, “aren’t I?”

“I don’t know,” Erwin replies truthfully, moving to grab a quill, dip it into the ink well, and start writing. “In an alternate universe, perhaps you’d be happy—a scholar?” He laughs lightly, stopping his scratching to look up at Armin. “Maybe I’d be an explorer, an architect, an engineer?”

Armin shakes his head and looks down, studying his hands intently. This is it—in this room, in the white blankness, with a one-armed captain who seems to know everything—this is what he’s amounted to.

“If I die,” he asks, “will I meet all the ones that went before?”

Erwin just shrugs a little, his quill scratching along the paper.

“I remember,” Armin continues, and although the tears in his voice are thick, the words still emerge, “when Eren told me about how Commander Levi keeps the patches of all the dead.”

“Are sigils really something you’re interested in, Armin?” Erwin asks, steepling his hands and staring down at Armin from his pulpit of a desk. “Magical symbols?”

“I’m not the one who decided to collect them,” Armin retorts. “Nothing has ever been my choice.” He says it without resentment—a mere statement of fact, just as has all his life been.

 _My grandfather died in the sun._

_My parents died from going over the Walls._

_Everyone dies._

“I don’t want to die,” he says, tears springing to his eyes, all the saltwater he missed. “I want to see stars in water.”

“Is this not good enough?” Erwin asks, and suddenly the room has gone dark, and there are ominous shadows. “This infinity?”

Armin tries to stop his vision from blurring, but he can’t, until he feels a hand on his shoulder.

“Arlert,” Erwin says, suddenly standing in front of him, his one good hand on Armin’s shoulder, “my father told your grandfather to always search the stars for direction.” There’s a sudden weight around Armin’s neck, and he looks up, tears still in his eyes even though he’s baffled by this speech. “It’s a compass, and it will always point you in one direction.”

That’s it, and Erwin steps away across the slate floor; Armin tries to follow, but everything goes dark. 

As he falls to his knees, subsumed by the dark oak and burning candles, he thinks of running through the trees as a cadet—feet thudding through thickets, the way he could hear his own breath rasping in desperation, how he ran for the afternoon lessons, craved for the books—and he tries to find his breath.

And he thinks:

_He is a dismembered man  
He is a scarecrow in the fields  
He is a crow collecting trinkets  
He is a cellar seeker._

_He is the hollow man  
awaiting his fate._

And beside the sea, in this life or the next, he will remember that the stars always point in a single direction despite the madness of the world.


End file.
